As Marshall Grossman's preface explains, the earliest versions of some
of the essays in this first collection entirely dedicated to discussion
of the life and work of Aemilia Lanyer (1569?-1645) were included in a session
at the 1992 meeting of the Modern Language Association. Her country-house
poem, "The Description of Cooke-ham," had first crossed his desk three years
earlier as part of a packet of material sent along by a colleague who had
served on a university committee charged with developing suggestions for
the integration of women into the curriculum. Lanyer's admittance to college
classrooms and her emergence as a fit subject for scholarly discourse are
important signposts in the ongoing resurgence of interest in and recovery
and recirculation of the works of early modern women writers. Indeed, her
only surviving work, the long poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, was
the first volume in the lamentably cancelled Oxford paperback series, Women
Writers in English, 1350-1850, suggesting its importance to feminist
re-evaluations of the canon of Renaissance literature. Thus, Grossman's
volume not only sums up the state of the first wave of new Lanyer scholarship,
but also suggests the intellectual and commercial vitality of the study
of Renaissance women.

As is appropriate to a collection formed by issues of such pedagogical
and critical moment, the contributions address a full range of aspects of
Lanyer's career: from attention to life events, to considerations of her
theological and generic assumptions, to explications of the Salve Deus'
treatments of sexuality and its author's means of achieving enunciative
authority. The papers are of uniformly high quality. Two essays particularly
impressed me: Leeds Barroll's inquiry into Lanyer's life events, mounted
so as to help determine more clearly whether and how she secured the patronage
bonds her poem apparently celebrates, and Michael Morgan Holmes' investigation
of the possibility of a female homoeroticism contained within the Salve
Deus' celebration of bonds between women. These papers share an impulse
to push against what may be seen as an emerging orthodoxy in Lanyer studies,
first the unexamined assumption that the poet achieved some kind of standing
within the circle of female patrons to whom she serially dedicates her work,
and second that the community of women the poem and "Cooke-ham" invoke is
imagined only in terms of social -- and not erotic -- independence of men.
I like the way both these discussions force readers to think again about
the possibly self-censoring mechanisms by which Lanyer's poem may be being
admitted to canonical status. If not as potentially challenging to new feminist
assumptions, essays by Kari McBride, Susanne Woods, Janel Mueller, and Barbara
Lewalski do mark the curious "inside/outside" position towards prevailing
literary and cultural doctrines that Lanyer and her poem occupied. By creating
explicitly religious contexts for the usual courtly values of the patronage
poem (McBride), revaluing the colour vocabulary of Petrarchan poetics (Woods),
and laying open claim to divine inspiration and sanction for her appropriation
and revaluing of various kinds of texts (Lewalski), Lanyer actively created
herself as an author. Her work demonstrates both her understanding of received
modes, and her creative will in transforming them to her own purpose. The
Lanyer of these essays is perhaps less at variance with a developing critical
party line (if such a thing can be said to exist) than Barroll's or Holmes',
but this Lanyer -- generically conscious, possessed of a sense of literary
history, informed by theological understanding -- has the pedagogical advantage
of being very easily absorbed into existing narratives of Renaissance literature.
Mueller's discussion is noteworthy in that it compares Lanyer with Giles
Fletcher and Christine de Pizan, a strategy which succeeds in both highlighting
Lanyer's feminist particularities and in continuing the process of placing
her among her predecessors and contemporaries.

But not all of Grossman's essays want to place Lanyer securely within
the context of English and European literary practice. Achsah Guibbory's
discussion of Lanyer's radically feminized rereading of scripture comes
to mind, as does Naomi Miller's treatment of the significance of mothering
and motherhood in the Salve Deus. The effect of both these essays
is to estrange Lanyer and her poem from a reading practice which strives
to accommodate her within the purposes and terms of a traditionally-conceived
Renaissance canon. Guibbory and Miller, as well as Holmes, are interested
in analyzing the things that distinguish her from her fellow writers, rather
than emphasizing how she works with the materials which emphasize her resemblance
to them.

I certainly do not wish to overstate the radical potential of Guibbory's
and Miller's articles. But the volume's largely synthesizing and normalizing
view of Lanyer's accomplishment seems to me to suggest a manifestation of
the phenomenon in feminist criticism Margaret Ferguson trenchantly described
in a 1994 review essay, in which the local knowledge, which can aid in placing
a writer within the currents of Renaissance literature, is sometimes purchased
at the cost of declining to ask questions about the how and why of this
process of canonization. For instance, the social difference between writer
and putative patrons is a non-issue for Lewalski, who aims rather at emphasizing
the means by which Lanyer's poem challenges, opposes, and displaces patriarchal
ideology. (For a more extended critique of Lewalski's method in her important
book, Writing Women in Jacobean England, see Ferguson.) The volume
also forgoes tantalizing questions about race in Lanyer -- her poem's employment
of the tools of racial difference between women, as in its Cleopatra allusions,
as well as how race might be read into her own status as a half-Italian,
half-Jewish woman in Elizabethan England. The essays do not acknowledge
Kim Hall's provocative comments on these matters.

Grossman's collection, which concludes with a valuable annotated bibliography
by Karen Nelson, is important because it offers a portrait of the emerging
official Aemilia Lanyer now in the process of being absorbed into our teaching
and our understanding of literary history. But other work remains to be
completed about Lanyer, work inquiring more thoroughly and consistently
into the operations of race and class difference in her achievement of authorship.
Such work may not contribute to the establishment of the official Lanyer;
but it matters.